


where dwells the breath of all persisting stars

by seventhstar



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: M/M, Photography, Post-Canon, Zexal Secret Santa, barian domestic fluff in the bg, mizadoru + ensemble cast in the bg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 07:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3349307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘if he can catch it all on film, stash away the memories in a thousand digital snapshots, maybe he will stop being afraid.’ mizael, durbe, photography, and time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where dwells the breath of all persisting stars

**Author's Note:**

> this was a gift fic for tumblr user artricahearts.

_1\. protostar_

There used to be more stars in the sky.

Mizael zooms out, out, out, flat on his back on the roof of a building, trying to cram all the stars he can see into his frame. They are dimmer than he remembers, against a sky that is more orange than blue, in a city where night never quite falls. He tilts the camera left and right, but there is always a building in his way.

_Try not to commit any crimes unless you really have to_ _,_ Nasch had said. Mizael hadn’t broken into the tallest building in Heartland to take this picture, because it didn’t matter. He was up here with his new camera because Durbe had caught him reading the photography manual Akari had left behind, and confused Mizael’s boredom with deep interest.

_I look forward to seeing your work._

Durbe had smiled — soft, fond, open — and Mizael had longed to capture that, freeze it for later. If Durbe was so relieved that Mizael was participating, not hiding himself away, Mizael would let him have the lie. If Durbe wanted photographs, Mizael could oblige. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do.

It wasn’t as if he had a purpose, anymore.

The picture he takes, in the end, is a poor attempt at recreating the night skies Mizael remembers. But he’s caught the tops of glass skyscrapers, the sky reflected at ten different angles, in depth and shape that could never have existed in Mizael’s world.

It is the first time he thinks anything in this new world is beautiful.

It is the first photograph he keeps.

_2\. blue supergiant_

“What are you doing?”

At the sound of Durbe’s voice, Mizael pauses, mid-snap. The answer, ‘sulking’, isn’t particularly dignified, so he says nothing. The others are all enjoying the party, milling around and drinking and laughing.

He’s spent most of the past six months isolated. Now, faced with the prospect of human interaction, he feels out of place. So Mizael has taken refuge in the corner, with the camera, in hopes of looking productive, instead of spending the evening taking ‘selfies’ (Yuuma’s word) of himself in various outfits in an attempt to figure out why everyone kept comparing him to a pigeon.

Yuuma has tried to pry him out of the corner twice, with no success. Nasch has come over, to mock him and nudge him along. Foolish, to have survived a war and be defeated by conversation, but Mizael still feels adrift without a foe to fight or a prize to win.

Before, there was always _something._

Mizael offers Durbe the camera in lieu of words. He’s being taking candid shots of the others, experimenting. Having people pose for him feels false, but when he catches Merag mid-smirk or Alit with fists blurred, he feels as though he’s caught the truth.

Like he’s stopped time. And Mizael, with Tachyon’s abilities, and his history, has always been interesting in controlling time. Now, more than ever.

Durbe flips through the pictures, gaze intent. Then he sits down beside Mizael, on the edge of his chair. Their thighs touch. Mizael deliberately doesn’t look down, at the warmth of Durbe’s leg against his.

There are too many pictures of Durbe. Mizael keeps finding himself following him around the room, drawn in by Durbe’s ease. Out of the three of them, he is the only one who no longer seems like an alien. Durbe is intelligent, and insightful, and somehow he’s absorbed this world already, made it his own. Mizael’s not surprised; observation is one of Durbe’s gifts.

Durbe holds up the camera and peers through the lens.

He watches the party that way while Mizael grows more and more impatient.

“What are you doing?”

“You looked so intent.” Beneath the camera, Durbe is smiling again. “I want to see what it is you see.”

Mizael stares straight ahead. He is not blushing. “You’re making too much of it.”

Durbe hands him back the camera. “Here,” he says. “Show me.”

_3\. red giant_

Mizael stares down the pins. He swings his arm back, once, twice…then bowls.

The pins go flying, clattering to the waxy floor loudly. “Strike!” Alit roars, and he swings an arm over Mizael’s shoulder. The two of them and Gilag are a team, and they’re winning against Nasch, Merag, and Yuuma. All of three of them have strong arms and good aim, whereas both Nasch and Yuuma are terrible at bowling.

Durbe is sitting on the table between them, reading and watching over the top of his book. One of his arms is in a cast, from a sparring accident two days ago. Even with Barian healing, a broken arm doesn’t heal in a night.

He’ll have the use of his arm by the end of the week, but for now he’s missing bowling night. It’s a shame; Mizael had wanted to watch Durbe play, watch him stare down his target, watch him move. Take a few hundred pictures of him and delete them all.

Pictures of Durbe never come out quite right. Mizael doesn’t know what it is he’s missing.

“Give me that,” Nasch grumbles. He takes the ball out of Yuuma’s hands and stalks towards the runway. The ball dangles heavily from his hand, and Mizael picks up the camera and points it at him. He doesn’t have many pictures of Nasch, because whenever Nasch notices the camera pointed at him, he ducks and runs while Mizael calls him a coward and photographs his receding back.

Nasch approaches the line, arm swinging back. He takes one step…another…and an alarm blares as he steps over the line, onto the smooth surface of the runway itself. Startled, Nasch jumps —

— and slips, falls, and slams face first into the ground. The bowling ball rolls sadly into the gutter a few feet away and gets stuck. Yuuma yelps. Merag snickers.

Alir peers over Mizael’s shoulder and sees Mizael’s last shot. “Good one, Mizael,” he yells, slapping him on the back. Nasch is caught, trashing in midair, a hilariously confused expression on his face. He doesn’t look anything like the hard, angry leader that Mizael had followed when he first opened his eyes in Barian World.

Mizael misses those days so much it aches. But that Nasch could never have relaxed enough to humiliate himself in front of them this way.

An unexpected sound draws his attentions.

Durbe, face hidden futilely behind his book, is laughing.

“Dammit, Mizael, fucking delete that,” Nasch is yelling. Durbe covers his mouth with his hand to muffle himself, but it’s no good. He’s laughing so hard he’s crying, the book forgotten.

“I hate you all,” Nasch says, as he waves down an employee to fish out his gutter ball. Mizael takes a picture of Durbe while his eyes are closed, mouth open, all the burdens he’d carried for as long as Mizael knew him stripped away.

It’s perfect. He puts the camera down and doesn’t pick it up again for the rest of the game.

_4\. supernova_

The room is painted stark white.

Mizael has never had a room of his own before; he’s always lived out in the wild, without a roof over his head. But now, there is this place that is his alone: the walls bare and white, the bed in the center of the room piled with pillows, and the sunlight pouring in through the enormous skylight.

There’s not much else. Alit had forgone a real bed in favor of a small cot, so that he could fit in a windowsill garden and more workout equipment. Gilag’s room is the largest, in deference to his size. Nasch’s room is a bizarre, shark-themed nightmare. (None of them are allowed in Merag’s room.)

Mizael’s room has the photographs. He has prints of every size, photos of everything: the awkward group shot someone had taken on the Barians’ first day of school, Nasch and Merag’s 207th sibling squabble duel, one of the ‘selfies’ Yuuma had taken while Mizael’s back was turned, Gilag on stage with Sanagi-chan, Alit’s tequila milkshake giveaway. A night in at the Barian, all of them morose; a sparring match out in the woods, their flesh shed for stone as they went all out; a pile of battered copies of _The Seventh One_ _,_ shoved out of sight into a drawer in the kitchen.

Sunsets and starry skies, bullet trains and skyscrapers, every moment of Mizael’s third life caught and preserved.

“Incredible.”

Durbe is standing in the doorway of Mizael’s room. He’d helped Mizael paint, and they’d ended up flicking paint on each other until they both looked more like snowmen than humans. Durbe was the one who Mizael had asked to decipher the assembly instruction for his new beds, and it had taken two days, three hammers, and one very angry phone call to the manufacturer before it had been done.

But Mizael had insisted on hanging all the photographs himself. he thought of Durbe’s words — I want to see what you see — and how Durbe always lingered around him while he was shooting, just watching him. _Here you are,_ Mizael thinks, _this is what I’ve seen._

“When we were warriors,” Durbe murmurs, “there was never any time for things like this.”

“Alit and Gilag found time.”

“That was them.” Durbe stares. “We could never have…”

“Tch.” Mizael shrugs. “I don’t like to be idle.”

Durbe walks over to a set of photographs of the six of them, all mid-duel with their legendary Numbers in play. He reaches out to touch Mach’s face.

If it were anyone else, Mizael wouldn’t have allowed it. But he trusts Durbe to understand.

And then Durbe steps back and frowns. He looks over the room again, seeking some deficiency. “Mizael.”

“Durbe.”

Mizael follows his gaze to the ceiling, to the ring of photographs around the skylight.

Durbe, laughing at the bowling alley. Durbe, trying to get paint off his glasses. Durbe reading, and Durbe doing his homework, and Durbe exploring Yuuma’s artifact collection and Durbe at the weapons history exhibit downtown and Durbe in Barian form, glowing just before he attacked, and Durbe, fast asleep at the kitchen table, a blanket tucked over his shoulders.

He can’t stop time, can’t regain all the time he’s lost and wasted, can’t return to anything of the times he misses.

He can steal these moments, though, Durbe unburdened and free and happy, seal them in paper and ink and hoard them like a dragon does with gold.

For a moment Durbe says nothing.

“We’ve known each other for a long time.”

“Hmph.”

Durbe meets his gaze. “Mizael,” he says, hesitantly, “do you..still…”

“Yes.” Mizael reaches out and catches Durbe’s wrist. He’s got pen ink and graphite smeared on his fingers. “Yes.”

_5\. neutron star_

Durbe’s room looks like the library in Nasch’s castle. It is dark, with heavy curtains and bookshelves on every inch of the walls. The bed is nondescript, but he has two enormous and squishy armchairs.

There had been a time when the library was where Durbe hid from his problems. From his inability to serve two masters — Nasch and his home kingdom — without failing one or the other. From his and Nasch’s forbidden love. The books there had given him an escape.

Mizael is lying beside him on the bed, cards laid out against the sheets. He’s trying to photograph all his ace monsters together, but none of the arrangements he’s made so far please him. Durbe has set his book aside in favor of just watching him. Mizael approaches every composition as a kind of battle.

How much time had they wasted, holding each other at arm’s length, always afraid? There had always been an excuse to not do it — Nasch, alive and then Nasch missing, Vector, Don Thousand, war, fear, guilt — and yet, now that they had, it seems impossible to Durbe that he waited so long.

They’re free. Far from everything they knew, perhaps, but now they have an entire new world to remake themselves in.

“The lighting in your room is terrible,” Mizael grouses.

“I’ve arranged it that way on purpose,” Durbe says. He reaches out and gently tugs at the camera strap wound around Mizael’s wrist. “In the hopes you’ll put that down and stop neglecting me.”

Mizael looks at him. Scowls. Lowers the camera and carefully, carefully sets it down on the bedside table.

Then he pounces, and Durbe’s hands get tangled in Mizael’s hair, and his mouth is hot over Durbes, like a brand, tasing of light and power and —


End file.
